ABSTRACT
This chapter describes expression, on a daily basis, and with a degree of modesty and reserve that are rarely encountered, to the feelings, sensations, intuitions and new ideas that Sandor Ferenczi perceived, and to the uncertainties, the perplexities, the obscurities and even the theoretical weaknesses with which he was faced in his research. Ferenczi's preoccupations in the clinical diary are centred around three axes: a theoretical axis that concerns trauma and its metapsychological status in pathologies at the limits of classical analysis; a technical axis, closely linked to his conceptions of trauma, which leads him to establish and experiment with 'mutual analysis'; and a personal axis, which concerns the crux of his relations with Sigmund Freud, the analysis of their disagreement, and his attempt to elaborate it. The principal message of Ferenczi is undoubtedly that beyond his professional capacities, it is essentially the person of the analyst that counts − as much his human qualities as his psychic qualities.
